WALES — James Evans, a former Conservative party Member of the Senedd, was appointed chair of the Welsh climate change, environment, sustainability and rural affairs committee following his defection to Reform UK in January 2024. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage announced Evans as a Reform UK MP in February 2024.

The committee is the Senedd's only environmental scrutiny committee. Its role is to examine legislation and hold the Welsh government accountable for climate breakdown and environmental concerns. The committee scrutinizes Welsh government spending, administration, and policy, holds inquiries, and makes recommendations to the government.

As chair, Evans's primary responsibility is to ensure a fair balance of opportunities for members to ask questions and for expert witnesses to respond. Evans stated that rural Wales is "under attack" from large-scale green energy infrastructure. Reform UK would ban all new onshore windfarm developments in Wales if elected.

Bethan Sayed, head of politics and advocacy at Climate Cymru, expressed concern regarding Reform UK's previous statements. Sayed said, "The concern is that throughout the election campaign, we've seen Reform say things like 'we want to reopen the mines, we want to reopen the blast furnaces at Tata Steel', and putting forward those coordinated attacks on net zero, opposing certain renewable developments, and so that is then a worry, because that is the current track record. The work of the other committee members is to encourage Reform to engage in changing that narrative and seeing things in a different light."

Karen Whitfield, director of Wales Environment Link, stated her organization's interest in the committee's proceedings. "We will just have to see and obviously our members will be very keen to see that there isn't any bias introduced in the way that committee inquiries are chosen," Whitfield said.

Evans clarified the nature of the committee chair role shortly after his appointment. "The role of a committee chair is not to drive any personal agendas, but to make sure the committee scrutinises policy properly," Evans said. He added, "We'll just hope that, as we put committee reports together, government listens to them and that they respect the views of what our committee has to say and they take it on board, because scrutiny is there to improve legislation."